The shock for his wife and daughters was profound. None of them had had the faintest inkling that Gerald would die, and they had had no time even to adjust to his being seriously ill. For Daphne this was grief of a kind she had never experienced, but she gave no overt signs of it. She was controlled and fatalistic: what would be, would be. She quickly convinced herself that ‘death has come at the right moment for him, like a way of escape’. She thought of Gerald as someone who could not possibly face the horrors of old age, who was simply not equipped to age gracefully. He was the sort of person who ‘ought always to be young’, just like Peter Pan, and to condemn him to a gradual decline would have been too cruel. Hand in hand with this determined philosophy went another: she was sure that in some way Gerald was not dead. She was no more religious than he had been himself (in spite of her new habit, since her marriage, of saying prayers at night because Tommy did so) but she had a strong presentiment, from the moment she was told of her father’s death, that he was somehow around her. She concentrated hard on keeping this strange sensation alive and managed successfully, except for the moment when she had to witness her mother’s appalling distress. Then, seeing the placid, dignified, always elegant Muriel devastated by grief ‘broke me up’. She wrote to Foy that this utter wretchedness of her mother’s, the sight of her lying on her bed, her face obliterated by tears, racked by sobs, unable to speak, was ‘the worst thing of all’. She knew that, for all Gerald’s womanizing, it was Mo he had truly loved, and now he was dead she was utterly bereft. Daphne suffered for her and in doing so a compassion completed the softening of her attitude to her mother which had already begun. She felt close to her for the first time, even physically close, able to embrace her as she never had done before, and she felt instantly protective. There had never, or so she had thought, been any role for her in her mother’s life, but now that she could see how much support was going to be needed she was eager to acknowledge her new responsibilities. A kind of love for her mother touched her for the first time.

  But she did not go to the funeral.5 Gerald was buried with the other members of his family in Hampstead churchyard after a ceremony kept very simple and held in the evening to ensure privacy. Daphne went on to the Heath instead and released some pigeons. She was perfectly aware that this might seem an extravagantly romantic gesture, but she thought it in keeping with the spirit of Gerald and it comforted her to watch the birds soar into the sky and imagine Gerald equally free of the earth. Since she was persuading herself Gerald was not really dead, she saw this as a celebration and she felt reassured and almost happy. Then she helped her sisters deal with all the letters of condolence and found ‘it helped an awful lot, because we were able to do it in a sort of rather ruthless cold-blooded way, and we kept thinking how many of them would have made Daddy laugh, and so they made us laugh too. We kept thinking how Daddy would say “Good God – what the hell is old so-and-so writing for, he’s hated my guts for years”, or “Listen to this one – I never knew what’s-her-name had a bent for religion”, and though a lot of people might have thought us heartless and cursed with a mordant beastly type of humour, I don’t think we were – we were really being much closer to Daddy than all the people with the solemn faces.’6

  This feeling of closeness to Gerald stayed with her when she returned to Frimley, and instead of being depressed she found herself curiously expectant. One day she went into the local church and sat down, not to pray but simply to be quiet. She closed her eyes and an extraordinary conviction that Gerald was there came over her. She did not hear his voice or see his body, there was nothing ghostly or visionary about the experience, but she simply had the knowledge that he was with her. At the same time she had a sudden desire to begin to do what, at the back of her mind, she had been wanting to do ever since she heard of his death: write about him. She had only ever written fiction, but she knew this could not be fiction. It would have to be, she supposed, though she shied away from the word, a biography, but a biography intent on telling the story of Gerald’s life and catching the essence of him rather than a record of his theatrical achievements. The idea excited her, but at the same time made her nervous. She had all the du Maurier horror of being ‘wain’ (embarrassing) or ‘see me’ (showing off) or committing a ‘tell him’ (being boring). All three would have to be avoided. Then she was not sure if any publisher would be interested, and she felt she could not embark on such a venture without some assurance that it would be looked kindly upon. For two weeks after her visit to the church, she turned the idea over in her mind, wondering whether she should act on it or not. Was the challenge too great? Would Gerald have approved? Was it too near to his death to be decent? Would she be able to tell the truth without being disloyal or hurting anyone still alive? She felt hesitant and yet inspired and finally decided that there was no harm in trying, and seeing what resulted.

  In May 1934, she signed a contract for a biography of her father, but she signed it with Victor Gollancz, not with Heinemann, the publisher of her first three novels. This naturally caused everyone at Heinemann great concern. They felt they had done well for her and certainly did not want to lose her. John Frere, then a director of Heinemann and married to Daphne’s old friend Pat Wallace, rang her up, puzzled and hurt, when he heard the news, to find out what had happened. Daphne’s explanation was that Victor Gollancz had approached her with the idea of doing a biography of her father, immediately after Gerald’s death, and she had felt she therefore had to do it for him. This was untrue but a typical way of avoiding any confrontation, which she hated, or unpleasantness. In fact, the agent Curtis Brown himself had suggested Victor Gollancz7 as a more suitable person to publish it than Heinemann, who he did not think had done so well with Daphne’s second and third novels as he would have liked. Since the new book would be non-fiction there was no need for Daphne to feel disloyal. What was significant was Daphne’s own eagerness to try Gollancz – she might genuinely hate publicity, if it meant exposing herself personally to it, but at the same time she wanted to make an impact and see her books do as well as they possibly could, especially now that she was married and living on Tommy’s pay. She had shrugged off his worries about money, saying what she earned from her books would make up any deficit; but, now that she had been married over a year and produced nothing new, and the income from her last two novels was shown to be considerably less than that from the first, she was beginning to see that she would have to do better. According to Curtis Brown, and everyone else in the literary world, there was no one more likely to help with self-advancement than the dynamic head of a publishing house only six years old, Victor Gollancz.8

  Within a very short time Victor had developed a relationship with Daphne which she had never enjoyed with anyone at Heinemann. The strange thing was that, although she had a horror of any ‘showing off’ kind of behaviour, and was herself very reticent, Daphne greatly admired Victor’s vigorous approach to his work. In an era when advertising books was a discreet affair he had startled other publishers with his huge (some said vulgar) splashes in the serious newspapers. His first bestseller, after he set up on his own, was Isadora Duncan’s My Life, and true to his style he had immediately celebrated with a lavish party at Claridge’s, which became an annual event. By 1934, when Daphne contracted to write Gerald, his list was already impressive: A. J. Cronin, Joyce Cary, and Ivy Compton-Burnett were among the names. There was nothing Victor liked better than having a young author full of potential to promote, and in Daphne du Maurier he saw he had a gift: a talented, pretty young woman, already known for her novels, writing about her famous just-dead father. It was irresistible, a natural for the bestseller lists. And the bestseller lists were where Daphne wanted to be, not because she craved glory, not that she was greedy, not because she valued such a thing in itself, but because she wanted to fulfil her promise to be the breadwinner. She would write only what came naturally, but once she had done so her aims were practical and she saw no contradiction in that.

  Gerald: A Portrait was written in four months, in the summer of 1934. ‘The book was finished this morning,’ Daphne wrote to Victor on 31 August. ‘I am going to correct it with a severe blue pencil and you shall have it next week. I am glad to have done it up to time – never expected I would. Shows one can do anything if one tries hard enough.’ Victor, realizing the urgent need to bring out the biography while Gerald was still in everyone’s mind, had stipulated she must hand in the manuscript by the last day of that same year. He was delighted to have it ready by mid-September, and pushed ahead immediately for publication on 1 November to catch the Christmas trade. His enthusiasm thrilled Daphne – she recognized it as genuine and treasured her new publisher’s intelligent appreciation of what she had done. He praised the pace of the biography, the way it read like a novel, and this was exactly what she had aimed at – she wanted all the facts in but she did not want these to weigh the narrative down and get in the way of conveying Gerald’s spirit. This made for the lively style she wanted, but it also made the book a curious hybrid. It was written in the third person, even when Daphne was referring to herself, and yet it covered certain events in an intimate way more suited to the first person. Daphne struggled to be objective, hence the third person, but when she wanted to demonstrate the psychological insight only she possessed, she was constrained by her own style. Those passages in the book where she described Gerald’s character, are by far the most interesting and brave. She was not in the least afraid to be critical, pointing out that however successful her father had seemed, he was a man ‘whose soul cried out for a goal in life’ and that he ended his life ‘still without his creed’. She did not dwell upon his affairs with women, though she managed to make it clear these existed, but his depressions were the subject of her most piercing analysis. She saw him as a man whose ‘brain and his entire nervous system’ yearned for work of ‘a more intensive kind’ and who, when it failed to appear, became ‘stagnant and discouraged’. She stressed how spoiled he had been all his life and what a fatal effect this had had, and yet she rejoiced, too, in Gerald’s joie de vivre in his younger days and in a humour which had remained utterly childish. His work as actor and manager she praised, seeing as the pinnacle his performance as Will Dearth in Dear Brutus in 1917.

  Gerald rises out of this portrait wonderfully real and colourful, with all his charm intact, his eccentricities amusingly portrayed, and with the dark side of his nature sensitively drawn. About his relationship with her, Daphne’s character study was astute, but she pulled back from revealing the full extent of her own very mixed feelings about him. The book states frankly that he could not cope with the adolescence of any of his daughters and that the ‘very quality of his emotion’ made them all shy and made them want to distance themselves from this father to whom they had been so close in childhood. It also tells of Gerald’s constant refrain of ‘I wish I was your brother instead of your father’, and what a burden this at first amusing desire became. But the real misery Gerald had caused her, much of which went into The Progress of Julius, is lacking – Daphne wanted to keep faith with her father, to tell the truth, but only so far as she thought acceptable at that time. It was a shock to her to discover that a great deal of what she had so lovingly written was regarded on publication as, on the contrary, quite unacceptable. Many of Gerald’s contemporaries regarded the book as a betrayal of a father by a daughter and thought the descriptions of Gerald’s depressions distasteful, the exposure of his weaknesses crude, and the mention of his extramarital relationships outrageous.

  Fortunately, the reviewers did not agree. Michael Joseph, Daphne’s agent at Curtis Brown, had prophesied that Gerald would be hailed as ‘the most vivid, original and sincere biography for years’ and he was right. The Times, the newspaper Daphne revered most, called it ‘A remarkable book . . . some brilliant comic writing . . . the description of the family’s start for a holiday cannot be read . . . without laughing and then . . . the laughter dies and the reader’s heart sinks into sadness.’ Other reviews were equally laudatory and the sales were excellent. But from Daphne’s point of view what was even more encouraging was what she had earned. On publication day she received £1,000 and 20 per cent of the home sales up to 10,000 copies sold. Beside that, the disapproval of some old men sitting in the Garrick Club was nothing, and in any case the only people who really mattered, her family, had all read the book before publication and thoroughly approved.

  But after all the excitement was over, reaction set in. December found the triumphant biographer reporting to Tod that she felt ‘distinctly off colour’. All her insides felt mixed up and she was terrified she was pregnant again (though she wasn’t). She had come to the conclusion in Frimley, as she wrote to Foy, that she was only really happy ‘in the middle of Dartmoor in a hail storm within an hour of sundown of a late November afternoon’. Instead there were rumours that she might soon find herself in the boiling heat of Egypt where Tommy’s battalion might be posted. This dismayed her, but luckily the rumour turned out for the moment to be untrue. Her spirits remained low over Christmas – the first without Gerald as master of ceremonies – and though she had never expressed any affection for Cannon Hall, she was upset that it had been sold. Her mother and sisters moved for the time being into the Cannon Hall cottage she and Tommy had vacated, but there was talk of withdrawing from Hampstead entirely and moving to Ferryside. Unmistakably, an era had ended and, though she had always prided herself on not being sentimental, Daphne now found herself wallowing in sentiment and, something else more worrying, she found herself thinking more and more about the past, even the past beyond her own memory, just as Gerald had done. This was perhaps, she reasoned, what everyone did on the death of a parent, it was perhaps an inevitable rite of passage, but what puzzled her was how attractive the past already seemed, more attractive than the present; and yet she was not only happy in the present but knew that a great deal of this past had not been happy.

  The truth was that, although fundamentally happy, quite a large slice of her life was far from satisfactory and this irritated her. With Tommy as second-in-command she could not always shut herself up, as she had just done while writing Gerald, but was obliged to show some interest in the wives and families of the soldiers. She found this agonizing. ‘Can you picture me’, she wrote to Tod, ‘going round the married quarters and chatting up forty different women? “And how is the leg, Mrs Skinner?” and “Dear little Freddie, what a fine boy he is”, (this to a swollen-faced object obviously suffering from mumps, who comes and breathes over one.)’ She could not understand how the wives put up with their miserable existence – ‘I must say, though, the poor things are very cheerful on the whole, and clean.’ This apparent acceptance of their fate by the soldiers’ wives fascinated her – how could they bear such awful living conditions? It was her first glimpse of any kind of deprivation, since the only ‘poor’ she had come into contact with had been people like Miss Roberts, about whose cottage in Bodinnick there was nothing dreary in spite of the outside lavatory, and the Cannon Hall servants, who she had always felt lived rather well. But when she went into the army married quarters she was easily thrown by what she observed. ‘There was one wretched woman’, she told Tod, ‘whose husband was only a private and she had nine children under nine! They live in a room half the size of yours . . . and three of them wouldn’t walk and had a skin disease and they were all propped up on chairs round the room while the poor woman cooked the rather unsavoury stew for midday dinner.’ It disturbed her to witness such scenes and she knew she ought to try to do something about the more pressing problems these women had, so she dutifully tried to do her bit. She found out that several wives were entitled to certain benefits they were not getting, and on their behalf filled in forms and corresponded with the appropriate authorities. This, she knew, was the least she could do, but she shrank from any more serious involvement. She shrank, too, from other duties as an army officer’s wife, loathing any kind of social gathering and hating things like the presentation of prizes. Once, she got lost in the barracks and ended up in the middle of a group of soldiers who never guessed that she was the wife of the officer second-in-command of the battalion – ‘I had to run the gauntlet of wolf whistles,’ she told Foy, and thought of the scene with extreme embarrassment, dreading the men’s eventual discovery of her identity. Part of the trouble, she knew, was that she did not look like the received image of an officer’s wife. She looked like a slip of a girl, blonde and pretty enough to whistle at, always with a rather diffident air, someone who blushed easily and had no air of authority whatsoever.

  Getting away from army life was her prime object throughout 1935. She went down to Fowey as often as possible and even when it poured found the place ‘too lovely’ and felt better at once. A trip to Bodmin Moor put her in mind of a previous visit with Foy and she began to make notes for the new book she had contracted in February to write – for Victor Gollancz. Heinemann were still supposed to be her publisher for fiction, but Victor was determined to keep her and suggested to Curtis Brown: ‘A way out of this situation occurs to me. Why not suggest she signs an agreement for one novel with no tie-ups or options.’ It would be, he argued, ‘inefficient to have Gerald with one publisher and then a novel with another’ (but not, apparently, inefficient to have had three novels with one publisher then to have come with Gerald to him). This, he thought, would ‘enable her to satisfy herself about my suitability . . . as her novel publisher before committing her destinies rather more permanently to my hands’. Given this chance ‘I feel sure that when the time comes she will want to go with me’. He was prepared to pay an advance of £1,000 with the same royalties as for Gerald, and Daphne had been glad to accept. She had promised him another kind of novel from the ones she had already written – ‘a tale of adventure . . . set in Cornwall, full of smugglers and steeped in atmosphere’. On Bodmin Moor again, she felt it take shape.